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Two mechanisms underlying inhibition of return

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Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower reaction times to targets presented at previously stimulated or inspected locations. Taylor and Klein (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 26(5):1639–1656, 2000) showed that IOR can affect either attentional/perceptual or motor processes, depending on whether the oculomotor system is in a quiescent or in an activated state, respectively. If the motoric flavour of IOR is truly non-perceptual and non-attentional, no IOR should be observed when the responses to targets are not based on spatial information. In the present experiments, we demonstrated that when the eyes moved to the peripheral cue and back to centre before the target appeared (to generate the motoric flavour), IOR was observed in detection tasks, for which the spatial location is an integral feature of the onset that is reported, but not in colour discrimination tasks, for which the outcome of a non-spatial perceptual discrimination is reported. When eye movements were prevented, both tasks showed robust IOR. We, therefore, conclude that the motoric flavour of IOR, elicited by oculomotor activation, does not affect attention or perceptual processing.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (predoctoral grant, AP-2004-1509) and a postdoctoral fellowship of the Neuroscience pole of research in Ile de France (NeRF) to Ana Chica. Further support was received from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERCC grant to Raymond M. Klein) and research project PSI2008-03595PSIC to Ana Chica and Juan Lupiáñez.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Ana B. Chica & Juan Lupiáñez

  2. Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Ana B. Chica, Tracy L. Taylor & Raymond M. Klein

  3. Centre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle Epinière, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris6, UMR-S975, Paris, France

    Ana B. Chica

  4. INSERM UMRS 975. Pavillon Claude Bernard, Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, 47 Bd de l’Hôpital, 75651, Paris Cedex 13, France

    Ana B. Chica

Authors
  1. Ana B. Chica
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  2. Tracy L. Taylor
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  3. Juan Lupiáñez
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  4. Raymond M. Klein
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Correspondence to Ana B. Chica.

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Chica, A.B., Taylor, T.L., Lupiáñez, J. et al. Two mechanisms underlying inhibition of return. Exp Brain Res 201, 25–35 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-2004-1

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